


running down to the riptide

by The-Immortal-Moon (LunaKat)



Series: All Hollow's Eve (Edween 2019) [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dark, Edween Week 2019, F/M, Homunculus Edward Elric, Late Night Conversations, Prompt Fic, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-06 01:51:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21218603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/The-Immortal-Moon
Summary: For Edween Week 2019. Day 1: Déjà VuGolden hair in a high tail. Floppy bangs. Amber eyes. A face Winry knew too well.





	running down to the riptide

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I know I should be working on Grand Arcanum, but this is my OTP we're talking about here. I had to give it a go.

Winry is five when she first bears witness to alchemy.

As always, it begins with Ed and Al—they are catalysts in her life, in everyone’s lives, creatures made for wider pastures than the sleepy cradle of Risembool. This time they wish to share with her what their hungry young minds have reached out to snag and latch onto. Chalk lines are traced on the hardwood floor. Raw material streams between their fingers in silvery rivers, pools silkily in the center. Fingertips land on the circle’s rim.

When it first alights, golden-bright and glorious, energy crackling through the air in beautiful arcs, she is awed. To her young, naïve self, it looks nothing short of magic. Nothing short of a miracle.

Her wonder lasts until the sand at the center ripples to life. Apprehension starts to shiver through her as a tapered wave rises out from the center, bending and swaying and moving with a mind of its own. When a face starts to form, gaping at her, eyes hollow and mouth yawning, fear hits sharp and blinding.

Tears come. Tears collapse her to the ground. Ed and Al abandon their miraculous endeavor in favor of uncertain cowering, bewildered whispers laced with comfort and concern. This is not how this was supposed to go. They don’t understand. She doesn’t understand, either.

“Don’t _cry_!” Ed shouts, voice high and sharp with panic. “Hey! What’re you _crying_ for? Are—Are you just so in love with crying that you’ll cry over _anything_?”

That only makes her cry harder. Al whispers an admonishment.

Hands seize her shoulders, trying to pull her upright, but she bats him back. His face hovers above her, eyes deep and gold. “There’s nothing to be _afraid_ of! It’s just a little alchemy, that’s all! Oh c’mon, quit crying! Crying’s for babies, Winry, don’t you _know_ that?”

Between their legs, the doll can be glimpsed sitting innocuously in the circle’s center. Pretty wooden face, limp chestnut ringlets, a lacy little dress exactly like how she prefers to dress her dolls. Everything she could have wanted in a toy, there in the fabrication of their alchemy. Miraculously formed. The perfect gift.

If only she hadn’t witnessed the horrible truth of its birth, maybe she could have accepted it, too.

* * *

Winry is ten when one of her best friends drowns in the river.

The funeral is quiet and tragic in the way they always are, when death links itself to someone too young. Heads are bowed in collective mourning. Tears are shed by those who are neither kin or kith, but present to grieve anyway. Pity is spared for the poor family that lost a child, a brother, a friend.

Every scrap of her being rebels against the stubborn dryness that clings to her eyes. She wants her legs to give out so she can sob until her lungs hurts and her throat cracks. She wants to weep until her eyes burn and fall out of her head. She wants to scream at the sky until the web of her ribs collapses inside her chest. It isn’t fair, isn’t fair, she’s already lost her Mom and her Dad and now she’s lost her best friend too, and she has never wanted to cry so bad in all her life.

She won’t, though. Ed always called her crybaby, scolded her for how quick she was to break down. Something tells her he wouldn’t want her crying over him.

Besides, Al cries enough for both of them. He weeps like he’s trying to form a lake from his own tears so he can drown too, joint his brother at the bottom. He stays long after dark, mourning and grieving and stewing in undeserved guilt.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, when she opened the door to find him glowering at his feet.

His hands curled into fists. It occurred to her that she’d never really seen Al... _angry_, before. At least, not like this. “Can I stay here? I’m mad at Brother and I don’t want him to find me.”

That didn’t really make sense to her, but she didn’t have siblings, so who was she to say how they were and weren’t supposed to behave? She shrugged and sidestepped and allowed him to take refuge in her home. “Okay, sure.”

And then they found out that Ed must have tripped or slipped or something at the riverbank, while he was looking around for Al. Apparently Al usually goes there, but didn’t that time. Something happened. And now here they are, having a funeral. And Al won’t stop crying.

It wasn’t his fault, but good luck convincing him.

* * *

Winry is sixteen and sleepless.

Books crowd at the guest room’s corners like an unwelcome audience, although in reality, she is the intruder in their space. Sheska was gracious enough to clear them away, tuck them into closets and into neat towers on all sides so that the bed was no longer buried and blocked off. Darkness seeps through the apartment like treacle, thick and smothering as it drips hotly over the space, syrupy sweet to the point of unpleasantness. Shadows congeal on the walls as Winry stares at them, willing for her mind to quiet, for the weight of her head and all that it knows to still on the too-thin pillow it rests on.

The sharp, bitter shock has reluctantly fled from Mr. Hughes’s death, leaving a numbed sorrow that stings in the aftermath of the impact. There’s a gaping crater that her soul is trying to get used to, even though every part of her still greatly wants to resist a reality where good men are taken from their families, where daughters are left to grow up without knowing their fathers. It’s not _quite_ like the blow of her parents’ death, because that fractured her very being, splintered her heart into thousands of pieces that she still hasn’t been able to put back together again, but something breaks along the fault lines and brings a raw part of her to the surface. In hindsight, it was hasty and stupid and Winry would have been more cautious, if that still-tender thing inside her hadn’t been struck hard when Sheska revealed the contents of her investigation.

What Winry knew of Auric Bradley was rather sparse. Not what he looked like, not what who he was as a person, or who he was before the Fuhrer adopted him. Media carefully tiptoes around the subject. His photos are not circulated in newspapers. But he spoke to Mr. Hughes before he died, and there are discrepancies in the records Sheska unearthed. Discrepancies that point to Colonel Juliet Douglas, a woman dead for two years by the time she supposedly ignited the Ishval conflict. There’s implications of blood relation, of an adoption that occurred more as a cover-up than anything, a roundabout way for the Fuhrer to keep a lid on anything that might contradict the military’s official story.

And it made sense. So they donned military uniforms, Winry borrowing a spare, to confront him.

In the evening, Auric Bradley arrives in a limousine to pick up his brother Selim from boarding school. Security guards are few but ever-vigilant. They could pretend to be envoys of the Fuhrer until they got him alone and could properly discuss the truth behind the documents. It was a good plan. Winry had faith in it.

Until she saw his face.

The glimpse she caught as he emerged from the limousine made the back of her neck prickle. Golden hair in a high tail. Floppy bangs. Amber eyes. A face Winry knew too well. As they approached, he turned and offered an innocent little wave in greeting. He smiled like childhood in Risembool.

Wrath’s words flashed through her mind, half-mast in the moonlight and dappled shadow of Yock Island.

She snagged Sheska by the sleeve and whirled around and they _ran_.

His eyes burned cold on her back, long after he was gone from sight.

Of course Sheska was confused, bewildered, maybe even a little betrayed. After all, Colonel Mustang (that murderous coward) had already turned his back on the investigation. And even if Winry had the headspace to explain her suspicions, she didn’t even know how she would be able to tell Sheska about the homunculi and what they were, where they came from, what she and Al conjured up in his basement that day to replace his older brother.

Somewhere between her heart throbbing too-loud against her ribs and a long evening spent staring at the wall as she willed her horror to abate, Winry promised her an answer in the morning.

A sigh leaves her as she tries to bury her face into the pillow, curl the sheets tighter around herself to keep reality at bay. Her stumps ache with phantom pains—Colonel Mustang always said that she and Al were lucky, to have made it out with only a couple missing limbs each. Less fortunate souls lose so much more. Of course, that’s so easy to say, when your legs aren’t sparking wires coiled beneath gleaming steel chasses.

At least she kept both her arms. Al lost one each, an arm and a leg, but her hands are still nimble and dexterous in a way machines haven’t quite been able to replicate yet. With a steel hand, she wouldn’t be able to tinker with things or perform delicate surgeries or draw up schematics. She can still pursue her passion, even if she can’t walk on her own.

It wasn’t Al’s fault, but good luck convincing him. He ran away from home to get her real legs back. Joined the military on a hope and a prayer. Bound himself up in a silver chain in hopes of returning the freedom she lost.

But it _wasn’t_ his fault. She’s the idiot who agreed to help him instead of stopping him like she should have.

A sudden gurgle in the distance makes her snap her eyes open. It reminds her of how water hisses through pipes in the walls after a toilet flushes or a shower runs, but... Is it just her imagination, or does it sound closer than it should?

The bedframe gives a creak of protest as she sits up, the weight of her false legs shifting against the springs. She swallows as the blankets are cast aside. Metal footsteps clunk against the hardwood as she makes her way to the door, slow and steady and glinting unforgivingly in the moonlight that spears milky-pale through the crack in the drawn curtains. Towers of books watch her, literal walls of knowledge privy to her movements. The door handle is cool as she grips it. Hinges whimper like a frightened animal as the door opens. Shadows steep the hall in blackness.

Movement in the darkness catches her eye. Something hugs the ground, a wet black glitter. It whispers as it creeps slowly across the floorboards, smooth and self-assured, but cautious in a way only something sentient can ever be. When she lowers her gaze to meet it, it goes abruptly still.

Then it quickens.

An irrational fear leaps through her as she slams the door shut. Her heart beats in her throat. Her eyes sting. She tries not think about the way Wrath could contort his flesh into whatever he desired, because if the homunculi can change into anything, then—

Dark liquid oozes from beneath the door. A tapered scream leaves her throat as she scrambles back, her metal heels clanging against the floor. Somewhere in her clumsiness, her butt meets the ground, but water black as ink continues to pool in front of her.

Panic surges coldly through her as she hastily scrambles back, desperate to place as much distance between herself and that thing as she can, because it can’t be, it can’t be, _it can’t be_.

Something solid greets her upper back. The sudden contact has her nearly leaping from her skin. A fleeting glance over her shoulder reveals the bedframe, inhibiting her retreat. Books close her in on all sides, their spines winking with the metallic embossing of titles. There is no escape.

The pool continues advance. A tapering wave rises from the center of it, tar-black and glistening as the meager moonlight rolls across the sleek liquid surface. There’s a ripple through it, and Winry swears that as the light wobbles across it, she sees a face with golden eyes and golden hair and a too-familiar smile and—

And she’s five again, watching the raw ingredients of the doll bend and sway and empty, demonic eyes opening up at her.

Tears she hadn’t even realized were gathering spill over in hot streaks. Desperation robs the clarity from her as she scrambles to her right, where her duffle bag is half-zipped and her tools spill out haphazardly across the floor. Sweaty fingers find something solid and heavy and steel and curl around it like a sinner grasping their salvation.

Her wrench glints dangerously in the dim light as she holds it up, a meager defense between herself and the liquid creature before her.

A coldly impish smile flashes through the water as an all-too-familiar face emerges. “Sorry, Winry. Your wrench can’t scare me anymore.”

Her head throbs with denial. Colonel Mustang went back to the basement. Said he only found congealed blood and viscera, because whatever they made wasn’t stable enough to maintain its shape. It was a twisted thing that could never have ascended the steps, never could have straightened itself out into something human-shaped but not human at all. There’s no way. No way, no way, no way, no _way_.

He steps forward, slow. Black dress shoes polished to a shine, gleaming up at her with white crescent smiles. She lobs her wrench at his head.

It spins harmlessly through the creature’s liquid body and hits the door with a dull _thunk_.

That earns a burbling laugh, like a whirlpool circling a bathtub drain. “What? Aren’t you happy to see me?”

What looms over her now is what Edward Elric could have been, if he’d lived long enough to see sixteen, to grow this tall and strong and striking. If he hadn’t died at ten, when she still had an advantage over him in height. This is the faded photograph of a person that could have been, a never-should-have been, a carbon copy of a lost soul. Anyone else would have accepted it eagerly, this second chance that’s appeared before them. Miraculously formed. The perfect gift.

If only she hadn’t witnessed the horrible truth of its birth, maybe she could have accepted it, too.

“‘Don’t _cry_!’” There’s a mocking note in his voice—deeper, silkier than Ed’s was, rich with maturity—as he recites what the real Ed told her as a child, when the making of the doll terrified her to the childhood core. “‘Hey! What’re you _crying_ for? Are you just so in love with crying that you’ll cry over all _anything_?’”

A sob breaks in her throat. She pulls her gleaming legs in close, a vain shield as Not-Ed lowers himself fluidly to his knees. He moves like a brook in the countryside, swift and placid, seemingly cheery but ice cold once you plunge into the current. The collar of his black tank top dips low enough to proudly bare where the ouroborous kisses his clavicle bone.

Hands find her elbows, trace a frigid line up her arms until they cup her shoulders. His face hovers above her, bloodless as a corpse’s. “‘There’s nothing to be _afraid_ of! It’s just a little alchemy, that’s all. Oh c’mon, quit crying! Crying’s for babies, Winry, don’t you _know_ that?’”

Meager moonlight washes out his hair, turns it white as a sun-bleached bone. She remembers how bright that hair was against the slick red mess curdling beneath the mangled thing she and Al managed to create. He smiles like frost on a winter morning—his eyes gleam violet, with all the warmth of jewels.

“At least, I _think_ that’s what I said, the day we made that doll.” He draws closer. Close enough for her to feel the coolness of his breath against her tear-damp cheeks. “Shh, hey, don’t cry. Didn’t you _miss_ me? Isn’t that why you tried to _bring me back_?”

_Oh God_, she thinks helplessly.

“You, and Alphonse?”

Any scrap of denial she might’ve had the willpower to cling to is pulled bloodily from her hands. Her neck loses the ability to support the weight of her head and she bows forward. Metal kneecaps meet her forehead. “M’sorry.”

Abruptly, he goes still. A ripple goes through his body, so sharp and swift she would have missed it if she hadn’t felt it through the hands on her shoulders. “...‘sorry’?”

“We d-didn’t know.” The words are muffled into the fleece of her pyjama pants. Tears burn her eyes on the way out—burn like damnation, like a punishment. “We didn’t know. We— So much b-blood and you were s-so— We didn’t t-think— T-That you’d s-survive or— T-That was a-anything we could d-d-_do_—” If she looks up, she’ll break. “M’sorry, m’sorry, m’sorry, please, _m’so sorry_.”

Silence folds itself into a tight little bundle in the space it takes him to respond. That just makes her cry harder.

Finally, there is a sigh, soft as morning mist. The cold weight of his hands abandon her shoulders. There’s a whisper of rustling cloth as he settles next to her, a chill in the sliver of air that separates them.

“Well,” he says to the air. “_That_ was unexpected.”

Somehow, some way, she scraps up the courage to raise her eyes without shattering to pieces. Through the blur of her vision, she makes out the curve of his legs, pulled in close to his torso in a way that suggests haphazard casualness rather than vulnerability. Elbows and knees meet, arms limp as though they’ve lost the will to do more than just flop about carelessly. He’s leaned back against the bedframe, bangs pale curtains over his profile.

It’s almost hard to see him through the darkness, because he is drenched in it so thoroughly he exists in this half-submerged state. Dark gloves spread from fingertip to bicep like a contagion. His legs are draped in black pants that know where to cling and where to not for ideal movement. The shirt is the same way, tight around his chest, loose around his torso, framing him in this portrait of dangerous, fluid grace like it’s the only thing it knows how to do. As she blinks clarity into her vision, she notices the scarlet line that traces from the side of his throat, as though the raised node there were bleeding, down his shoulder and then streams to his elbow, where it congeals into a matching node.

A sniffle gurgles in her nasal cavity. “Didn’t you come here to kill me?”

To this, he tilts his head subtly, just enough to conceal his eyes while revealing a sardonic curve of bloodless lips. “_Actually_, I came because Wrath said you were nice to him. And I wanted to see for myself just how ‘nice’ someone like you could be.”

More silence lapses. Up close, she realizes his hair is actually the wrong color—it spills past his shoulders, halfway down his back, in a shade too muddy and ashy to be proper gold, like the artist who painted this terrible masterpiece was working with tainted hues.

Then he adds, almost conversationally, “I wasn’t expecting an apology, though. That was nice.”

Her forehead greets her kneecaps again. “I’m sorry.”

She can feel the gaze that settles on her, chilling as an unexpected cold current. It lifts the next moment. “Quit crying, you idiot.”

For some reason, she obeys. Wipes at the snot dripping from her nose with her knuckles. Messily thumbs away the tear-tracks on her face. Even when she was a kid, she was a messy crier. There’s nothing beautiful about sorrow, of course, but still.

“I r-really _am_ sorry,” she manages, through the hiccup of a sob. “I didn’t—we didn’t—”

“I suppose I should compliment you on your craftsmanship,” he interrupts.

“...huh?”

For emphasis, he stretches one arm out in a fluid black ripple. The arm is long, and graceful, and not slender but not really bulging with muscle either. He flexes the hand to show the dexterous movement of the fingers and the tendons and the bones beneath his skin. “When most people resurrect their loved ones—or try, anyway—they have this image in their head, of the way the person looked and how they remember them. They never account for aging, or time passing. What they want is that unchanging ideal. So homunculi are usually the same way—unchanging, unaging, for all intents and purposes immortal.”

He lowers his arm. The hand clenches briefly into a fist, then abruptly relaxes. “But you two were... different. You wanted him to grow up alongside you, didn’t you?”

It comes back, the shadow of grief that fell over her, still fresh and blinding. Al, approaching her with his plan, confident he could pull it off—but not without help. “I m-mean”—she sniffles again and wipes furiously at her eyes, but they still burn—“who wants to be a kid forever, right?”

“...fair enough.” He flexes his hand again. The fingers are dark, blurry movement against the shadows thick on the walls. “Can’t say I don’t appreciate not being a ten-year-old pipsqueak anymore.”

An insane impulse strikes her to laugh, just then, wild and off-kilter. Somehow, she stifles it. “Ed _hated_ being called short.”

His hair ripples as he turns to look at her. Chatoyant violet eyes gleam with chilled laughter. “Not short _anymore_.”

Pain lodges in her throat as she looks away. She shouldn’t be doing this, sitting here and laughing with this imitation of her childhood friend. This faded photograph, this off-color copy. Something she made in her friend’s basement one night to replace someone she lost. He’s not even human—an almost-human, a not-quite-person who has the same face, same voice, same sense of humor. But he’s not that person. He’s someone else.

Some_thing_ else.

There’s a drafty sigh, and she feels the air shift as he rises to his feet, all fluid grace and liquid danger. A languid stretch rolls through his spine as his arms lift high over head. She watches as his hands drift to the back of his head, where the gloved fingers thread themselves idly through his off-gold mane.

“Do you have a spare hair tie I can borrow?”

“W... What?”

“Hair tie,” he repeats, turning to her casually. Any trace of the frostbitten creature that loomed over her before has thawed. “I shouldn’t have let my hair get this long—it’s always in my way, now, and I can never remember to bring a tie.”

“Oh.” She blinks. It’s so random, and so mundane, and she doesn’t know what else to do but straighten her false legs out and rise to her metal feet. “Uh. Yeah, sure.”

A creak from the bedframe signals that he’s seated himself on the mattress while she rummages around her bag. Tools jab at her hands, as though to remind her that she thought she was going to die moments ago, convinced he came here to kill her, and insist she arm herself. But whatever danger jangled through her before has passed over, a bad spot of weather. Gusty winds and flashes of rain and now the sun is tentatively peeking through the clouds to call a truce.

Or maybe she’s just in the eye of the storm, a brief respite, before he bruises her throat with his fingertips.

“I don’t recommend trying anything,” he remarks airily from behind her. “You saw what happened with the wrench.”

Oh. Right. She glances over at the door, where a dent has no doubt formed in the wood from the steel impact. Her trusty tool glitters on the floor, beckoning, far out of reach. _...Sheska’s not__ gonna like that._

More creaking from the bedframe. A glance over her shoulder shows him leaning back idly, peering at her through half-lidded eyes. “I could also kill you in a moment.”

Her fingers close around a tie. A shiver tiptoes down her spine. “Wouldn’t you have killed me already, if you were actually going to?”

As she rises back up, tie in hand, he makes a show of tilting his head this way and that, mulling. Finally, he looks at her with those chilly violet eyes and smiles thinly—it’s probably meant to be intimidating, but it looks strangely mischievous to her. “Maybe I’m still deciding.”

Swallowing, she passes the tie to him. But when he takes it from her, she can’t seem to will her fingers to unlatch from the elastic.

“...do you want me to braid it for you?”

Confusion passes across his face, followed quickly by suspicion. “Why?”

Uh... good question. “Because, uh... B-Because— Because if you kill me now, your hair doesn’t get braided?”

Amusement curls his mouth into a smile, a flash of white teeth. There’s no warmth in it, but it softens him, somehow. He surrenders the tie back to her custody before turning, head bowing, his back and his hair bared to her. “Lucky for you, I never did figure out braiding.”

Reluctantly, she settles behind him, ignoring the groan of the springs as her weight meets the mattress. The tie is rolled onto her wrist to wait for when it’s needed—in the meantime, she gathers up his hair in her hands, and the softness of it surprises her. For some reason, she found herself expecting it to be oily and coarse, and instead if feels like running her hands through feathers.

“I saw you in a ponytail earlier today,” she points out. If he’s going to conversational, then so is she.

“That’s only because Selim reminds me in the mornings.”

There’s something possessive about it, his hair. Something in the way it snares around her fingers like it’s trying to draw her in and drown her makes her arms prickle with goosebumps. “It’s all an act, isn’t it?”

He holds perfectly still in a way that Ed never would have. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

“Auric Bradley.” His hair is soft, but there’s a coldness to it. It reminds her of that time she found a dead bird that had crashed into the window and broken its neck long before she discovered it. The feathers tickled her fingers, but it was still very dead. “That family doesn’t know who you really are. _What_ you really are.”

“They don’t seem to mind,” he replies, listless.

After dividing his hair into three sections, she sets about weaving them together. “Do you care about him?—Selim, I mean. I know you _play_ the part of his brother, what with you picking him up every day, but. Do you actually...?”

That earns a decently long pause. She finishes the first link, moves on to the second.

“Well,” the creature says, voice light, airy, disinterested, “I was made to be _someone’s_ older brother. That person doesn’t necessarily _have_ to be Alphonse.”

Perhaps she should say something to that, but the words don’t come. She bites the inside of her cheek and keeps weaving.

Slowly, he turns, not so much so that she has to adjust the angle or scold him for disrupting her work, but just enough that she can see a sliver of his violet gaze through the veil of his feathered bangs. “Did you love him?”

“Al? He’s actually more like a—”

“You know who I mean.”

She stills. Her eyes itch anew. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Curiosity,” he says, like they aren’t treading heavy ground.

Breathe in, breathe out. Remember, Winry, this thing isn’t human, and it could turn on you in an instant. Just like Wrath with Miss Izumi.

So she bows her head and pretends she doesn’t feel the prick of his amethyst eyes on her as she continues. “I... I don’t think that’s the right word, exactly. I mean, we were kids—what did we know about romance?”

But the homunculus isn’t satisfied with that, apparently. “What if he’d lived?”

In, out. She blinks to keep the tears in. “Guess I’ll never know now, will I?”

He gives a grunt of displeasure with the evasion, but doesn’t object. Just turns his head back to face the nearby wall of books and lets her work. Shadows undulate all around them until she reaches the end.

As she unrolls the tie from her wrist to her fingers—something in her just... stops working. Freezes in place. Her heart leaps to her mouth and the palpitations reverberate through her teeth.

It doesn’t go unnoticed. Languidly, he tosses a glance at her over his left shoulder. Against the darkness, his eyes seem oddly vivid. Suddenly, she is reminded of those lovely little decorative stones that gleam translucently from the bottom of fish tanks, glassy and colorful and cold. “Something wrong?

“...were you the one who killed Mr. Hughes?”

The hesitation that follows nearly kills her.

Then, from the brink, she’s revived by, “I’m not the one who shot him, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Gulping back a sob, she proceeds to bind the end of his braid into place. The pain comes crashing back, raw and aching. “But you know who did.”

“It was a shame,” he says, in lieu of an answer, as he turns back to face the books. “He seemed like a good man.”

“He _was_.”

Either the ferocity in her voice surprises him, or she tugs on his hair without meaning to, because he whirls back to her, blinking in open surprise. For a moment, unguarded and lacking that cold, stoic exterior, the shadows strip all the monstrosity from him, and he strikes her as shockingly young.

Why wouldn’t he be? Only four, almost five years, have lapsed since she and Al bumbled him into this world in a haphazard tumble of coltish limbs and a congealing scarlet mess of bodily fluids. Even less time since that he’s had his human shape and was able to walk among creatures that looked just like him, but were fundamentally different. Even then, they made him to be their age, and they’re still children themselves.

The moment passes, and he schools himself again, a stone unyielding as the stream bends around it. “A shame,” he repeats, flat.

She has to sit back and curl her fists into her lap to keep from doing anything reckless. He’s right about the fact that he could probably kill her with terrifying ease, because she is human and he is not, and she would remember that more completely if grief weren’t ravaging her heart. “You’re complicit, aren’t you? The records make it sound like you’ve been taken prisoner to keep your mouth shut. So, when people look into the war, they find a hostage. You’re _bait_. People come to you, hoping to learn what you know or even _save_ you, and then you just— Pass their name along so whoever it is you work for can _kill_ them. Isn’t that how it works?”

All of sudden, he surges forward—and she braces herself for him to swamp her in a watery embrace that will be the last thing she ever knows.

But then a beat passes. And another beat. And another. And nothing happens. No liquid surges into her mouth, her nose, her eyes. Nothing smothers her or leaves her lungs desperately screaming for oxygen. There is no pain, no discomfort, not even a brush where his skin might make contact with hers.

Reluctantly, she cracks an eye open.

He’s so close that collision is all but imminent, like he was going to crash into her and changed his mind at the last second—that, more than anything, is what sends goosebumps skittering along her arms. Not that his eyes threaten to drown her, luminously inhuman, gleaming violet against a world seeped so heavily in darkness she can barely see her own hand in front of her face. Not the way his breath, cool and damp, caresses her cheek as he exhales. Not the fact that his skin carries the sour tang of alchemy, or the heady wetness of an abandoned cave where water drips slow and steady off jagged stalactites. Not that he gazes at her as though he’s trying to see inside her, trying to peel back her skin to glimpse her soul. Just the closeness, and the shock of it, that has her heartbeat quickening in her veins, or heat rising to nip her ears. That’s all.

A thumb brushes her cheek, silky and light and cool. “I thought I told you to stop crying.”

Starting, she draws back, and meets the lingering cold spot with her fingertips. To her surprise, a salty dampness greets her. Only then does she realize the stinging burn has returned to her eyes, that she started crying again without even realizing it.

As she moves to wipe them away, though, something in her hardens, and she lowers her hand defiantly. “I’ll cry if I want to.”

His pale (full) lips purse into a displeased frown, but he reluctantly draws back, which is better than nothing.

Then he spills off the mattress and undulates to his full height. Only a few patches of deathly white serve to carve him free of the darkness, the off-gold braid a beacon as the shadows press in all around them. Another languid stretch ripples down his spine. “A word of advice, Winry? My master doesn’t like it when people start catching on. If I were you, I’d stop asking questions like that, otherwise you and your little friend sleeping in the next room over there will be dead by morning.”

Fear prickles at her arms, traces a path up to her shoulders and climbs her neck and tingles inside her throat. She swallows and glowers and refuses to let it show. “Is that right.”

Something in her tone must displease him, because he turns to face her with a scowl. “Hey. I don’t _like_ seeing people die.”

“But you don’t stop it,” she returns.

“Well why should I?” A liquid shrug. “Not _my_ problem.”

All at once, she feels so, so stupid for even entertaining the notion that this person (if he can even really be called a person at all) could ever be Ed. Because if _this_ isn’t proof of the contrary, she doesn’t know what would be. Even Ed, brat though he was when they were ten and stupid—even when he complained about all the times she cried when she skinned her knees or twisted her ankle or cut herself, he never left her to bawl her eyes out. Without fail, he would scoop her up, haul her over his shoulders, and carry her back home.

This person—this imposture. He would probably leave her to drown in her tears while he continued about with his business.

Whatever shows on her face has him rolling his eyes exaggeratedly before he swiftly turns on his heel, once again subjecting her to the dark expanse of his back. When he tilts his head this way and that, the swish of the bright braid across his shoulder blades reminds her of a ticking clock. “So? How does it look?”

For a moment, she considers not responding. But then she shrugs and replies, “It suits you.”

“Does it?” He sounds vaguely amused by that.

Winry looks away. Suddenly, the weight in her knees, her legs, revisits. They are steel and titanium instead of flesh and blood, replacements after the originals were destroyed by the same forces of alchemy that cobbled him together that night. Everything that’s come to pass now—her gleaming metal legs, Al in the military, the imposture in the shadows—would never have happened if she’d just been a little wiser, back then.

“I think it’s about time I leave. Don’t want to worry my ‘parents’ after all.” Smooth footsteps glide across the hardwood. She watches from the corner of her eye as he moves—that fluidity isn’t natural, isn’t something that any person can accomplish. He’s at the door in seconds. “Nice meeting you, Winry.”

An image flares in her mind’s eye—Wrath’s pale hands wrapped around Miss Izumi’s throat. Her nails leave angry red crescents in her palms.

“What about Al?”

He stills with a gloved hand on the door handle, pitch-cloaked fingers light on the burnished brass. Through the fringe of her bangs and her lashes, she watches tension build in his shoulders, in his arms, in the glimpse of his exposed throat.

A long beat passes before he deigns to answer her. “What about him?”

Metal _thunks_ against hardwood as she stands. Two false feet, but she stands upright just the same. “Are you going to kill him?”

Darkness beats down heavy on them both. It fills the air when words refuse to.

Her footsteps are nothing like his, not smooth and soundless—they thump heavy against the floor. Their impact is all the heavier for the sin steeped into them, dyed into her very being. The creature she walks over to meet is a monster of her own making. Hers and Al’s. Their sin to bear.

By the time she reaches him, he’s turned halfway, his profile half-curtained by silky, off-color bangs. His face glows against the gloom, deathly white. It’s a corpses’ face. “In case I don’t see you again—thanks for the braid.”

Despite the fact that he must have at least an inch and a half over her, she doesn’t feel small, or swallowed by his shadow, like she should. Her eyes are wet and her face is wet but she stands with her shoulders squared as she faces him, either unafraid or just stupidly brave. “Thanks for the warning.”

Hinges whimper plaintively as he peels the door open. Instead of turning away, he stares at her, drinking her in, like he’s trying to figure out exactly what it is he’s supposed to make of her.

Fear makes her bold. Impulsive. “What do you call yourself, anyway?”

Something glitters in his gaze. Something wolfish that reminds her inevitably of the person he was made in the image of. Not the same though—colder, more distant, eyes inhuman violet instead of warm amber.

“There’s a theme, right?” Winry wets her lips. Her mouth is suddenly dry. “Wrath, Greed, and I think Al mentioned someone called Envy. So. Who are you?”

That earns her a thin, frosty smile. “Sloth.”

It’s insane on the face of it. Ed was—Ed was constant motion, racing down the paths and kicking up dust beneath his feet, tireless in his pursuit of whatever it was that he set his gleaming gold eyes on. He was grouching and grumbling and fidgeting unhappily in his seat, an enemy of stillness, an enemy of apathy. He was unceasing determination, was stubbornness incarnate, was ferocious feeling when others were impassive. He was a firecracker in human shape, bright and lively and bristling with life.

It’s insane on the face of it that something with Ed’s face could be called “Sloth”, or anything synonymous with it. That something with his face could sit so still, could speak so casually, could discuss his height without losing his temper, could lack the ferocity that so greatly defined him. That it could be so dull, and detached, and nonchalant.

“Suits you,” she says, soft.

“You think so?”

“Mm.”

A single step takes him forward, until his cold presence brushes against her, waves lapping at the hot-sanded shore. They touch, but never really meet. “Better than ‘Edward Elric’?”

“Yes,” she whispers. “Much better.”

Because it’s insane on the face of it that something with Ed’s face could be liquid instead of fire.

Soft, breathy laughter tickles her ear. Then his lips brush her cheek—featherlight, gliding over a stray tear she hadn’t even realized had pearled on her skin. The touch is cold as raindrops after a long drought.

“Goodnight, Winry. Try to cry less, okay?”

Before she can protest, he dissolves into the shadows as though he were born from them. She pushes the door aside, but all she can see is a black, glistening pool that retreats around the corner, disappearing in nothing more than a distant whisper of water and the echo of wetness on the floorboards.

Fingers tremble as they make contact with the spot. She leans against the doorframe, tears streaming down her face, silence beating all around. Darkness, laughing at her, and the lost memory of golden eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Oops. I wrote more Sloth!Ed. Honestly wish there were more EdWin Homunculus!Ed AUs. Guess I'm gonna have to get started on writing them myself.
> 
> Technically Day 1 was _yesterday_, but I had a midterm today and needed to study, so now everything is probably going to be one day off.


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